If mankind can create artificial life in a machine, when would we define it's death?
Death as we know it for natural life is terminal. That is once dead, natural life cannot come back (at least in the current understanding and with current technologies---some people believe otherwise).

Death for AI is trickier. There may be only one scenario: Global destruction: Extreme scenario where everything supporting the existence of an AI disappears. This is equivalent to death in natural life, and low probability. It means all AIs die at once (as well as us).

We also do not know the degree and form of embodiment necessary for AGIs. We can assume now that hardware is replaceable indefinitely, thus "limiting" death to the above extreme scenario. But AGIs "body" may not be indefinitely replaceable. Then a definition closer to natural life death may be necessary.



We see arguments for two other scenarios, that I refute below:

"Static Death": An AI is still "defined" or "saved" somewhere (whatever it means actually), but it is not authorized or able to use resources. Assuming an AI is made of hardware and software, it is like a program stored on a disk, but without permission to run. 

"Dynamic Death": Under the same characterization of AI as hardware and software, dynamic death is the invalidation of progress akin to strong liveness properties, where an AI is trapped in an infinite loop (or a void loop), in a form of "active death", as what happens to Sisyphus in Greek mythology. This is different from static death, as the AI still uses dynamic resources, although it cannot make progress. Continuing under the same assumptions, such AI could be "loaded" in main memory, or locked waiting for inputs or outputs to complete.

Note that in these two scenarios, rebirth is possible, and they also subsume that there is an entity that can decide conditions for rebirth, or preventing it completely. Would this entity be an "admin", a god, other AIs, or a human is another question, really.

The terms "death" and "rebirth" here could just be changed for "imprisoning", where the dynamic version would be like our human prisons, and the static version would be like SciFi cryogeny. This is a bit of a stretch, but we can see an equivalence, and no good reason to qualify these two scenarios as deaths.

In conclusion, death for AI seems to be an exceptional, singular scenario, so AI cannot die in practice, except if we are wrong on how we think we can make AGIs. AI can however be imprisoned forever.



Note: The terminology above is completely made-up for the post. I do not have citations to back some claims, but it is based on readings and personal work (including in software verification).